Paul Rand

Paul Rand first became famous for covers for Direction Magazine

Paul Rand illustrated a wide range of publications and could communicate about about a wide range of topics.

He saw the potential to communicate complicated messages in a very reduced and simple way.

Key Questions:

Look at the following images and consider the elements that they have in common?

Formal elements to assess:

ShapeFormColourToneLineTextureCompositionScale

Paul Rand also produced work for other media including packaging:

Perfume Bottles:

Consider whether these have any common elements in relation to the illustrations?

And posters:

Influences and Inspiration:

Rand combines language from poetry and business and drew on inspiration that was as oppositional to business as possible. He admired and spoke about influences such as artists including Paul Cezanne and Jan Tschichold.

Key question:

Consider how the two images of inpsiration could have turned into Rand’s design?

Bold Collage:

While the artform had been used in the arts for some time. Rand was one of the 1st to collage photographs and combine them with shapes and colours in magazines to lend weight to editorial, a style taken from artists like Laszlo Maholy-Nagy.

Laszlo Maholy-Nagy

The cover of this PM is widely recognized as one of the iconic images of 20th-century American Graphic Design.

Laszlo Maholy-Nagy

Identities:

One of his strengths, as Moholy-Nagy pointed out, was his ability as a salesman to explain the needs his identities would address for the corporation.

Modernism and Paul Rand:Paul Rand’s ideas suggested that there was a way of communicating something in a perfect way. He thought that ideas could be refined so much that they would not be confused.

Modernist artwork tends to be organised, without clutter and idealistic.

He wrote and spoke widely about these kinds of ideals within design at taught these skills at Yale University.

Post-ModernismGraphic design and the arts in general have changed a lot since Rand started working.

The current era of design is called Post-Modernist. It is an era where people have started thinking that there isn’t really a single perfect solution to a design problem that will communicate the best.

Rather, artists and designers now tend to think that there are multiple solutions for different individuals. Because of this Post-Modernist art and design tends to mix all kinds of different styles together, without saying which one is better.

Post-ModernismAn example of this is Barny Barford’s work that combines classic ceramics with consumer branding:

Post-ModernismThe kind of design might be a lot less clear. It may be more layered and more fractured like this work by David Carson:

Impact of changing attitudes towards design:Because of his high-modernist ideals, Rand became frustrated with the rise of Post-Modernist design and even resigned from his teaching post at Yale when they appointed a Post-Modern designer called Sheila Levrant de Bretteville:

Logo Design

Paul Rand is most famous for his timeless logo designs. He summarised what a logo is and does as:

• A logo is a flag, a signature.• A logo doesn’t sell (directly), it identifies.• A logo is rarely a description of a business.• A logo derives its meaning from the quality of the thing it

symbolizes, not the other way around.• A logo is less important than the product it signifies; what it means is

more important than what it looks like.• A logo appears in many guises: a signature is a kind of logo, so is a

flag.

Perhaps the most famous logo is the design for IBM

Key questions:• Could you say this about any kind of art form? • How might these principles relate to your own work?• Is there a part of your work that could be refined in the same way a

logo could?• What ideas does Paul Rand’s work give you?

Further references:

For a wide range of lectures, presentations and writing by Paul Rand on the nature of design go to:

http://www.paul-rand.com/index.php